Justin Wingate, Ranchman

by John Harvey Whitson

Sibyl Dudley searched for both Curtis Clayton and William Sanders. When she could not find them, she reasoned that they had gone back to Paradise Valley, and sent them letters urging them to return to Denver. Ben had arrived, and after a talk with Sibyl, and another with Mary, he had induced Mary to send a pressing invitation to Lucy Davison to visit her for a few days.

Meanwhile, Justin was trying to find himself. The violence and virulence of party and factional feeling astonished him. He had not known that men could be so rabid and unreasonable. He was as bewildered by the discovery, and by the furious assaults made on him by men and newspapers, as he had been by the surprising fact of his election. He could not have been assailed more vindictively if he had been a criminal. To hold an honest opinion honestly seemed to be considered a crime by those whom it antagonized.

Candor had ever been impressed on him as a cardinal virtue. It brought a shock to discover that it was anything but a virtue in this political world to which he was so new. Concealment, duplicity, the accomplishment of a purpose by fair means or foul, these seemed to be the things that had value. It was true that a certain faction in Denver agreed with him, but the agreement was for pecuniary and material reasons. He could see that if their interests lay in the other direction they would oppose him as heartily. Even these men could not keep from pointing out to him how much he was to gain. They thought to stiffen his courage by assuring him that he was on the side that must win. As if that would move him now! No man seemed able to understand that the opinions he held and expressed had no root in a desire to advance himself or enrich himself.

With these discoveries came a temporary weakening of his faith. He was no Sir Oracle, and had never pretended to be, and he began to doubt himself and his conclusions. He wanted to do right, but what was right? Was it an abstraction, after all? He had never before questioned the certainty of those inner feelings on which he had always relied for guidance. Was conscience but a thing of education? A man had told him so but the day before.

As there was no help outwardly he had to burrow for it inwardly. The stimulating wine of memory lay inward, and he drew on it for strength, recalling those hours and even days of quiet thought and talk with Clayton which followed the election. Before him in all its pristine beauty rose that dream of Peter Wingate, that the desert, by which Wingate meant Paradise Valley, should blossom as the rose. Wingate’s hopeful and prophetic sermons had made a deep impression on the plastic mind of the boy who heard them. Though Justin scarcely knew it, that dream of a redeemed desert, working slowly through the years, had become his own. It had long been merely a vague desire, holding at first the form given to it by the minister, that settlers might come in and till the land. But Justin had long since seen that if settlers came in, they must go out again if water was not to be had, and that irrigation alone possessed the transforming power which could make the dream a reality.

The farmers now in Paradise Valley were irrigating as well as they could. They had little money and their devices were of a make-shift character. Yet wherever they could induce water to flow the desert bloomed. Justin had come to sympathize with them in their struggle against adverse conditions the more perhaps because he had so long held that guilty knowledge of the fact that Ben Davison had cut their dam.

In thus surveying the field before him and choosing between the cattlemen and the irrigationists, as they were represented in the valley of Paradise, which was the only world he knew well, Justin had a growing comprehension of that large truth, that if he who makes two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before is a benefactor, a still greater one is the man who changes a cattle range, where ten acres will hardly support a cow, to an irrigated land where five acres will sustain a home. This was the thing indefinitely and faultily foreshadowed in Peter Wingate’s dream.

The conditions in Paradise Valley were duplicated in many places throughout the state. Should the struggling farmers give way to the cattlemen, or should they be assisted? If the farmers held the irrigable lands there would be plenty of range left; for there were millions of acres which could never be touched by water, where cattle could graze undisturbing and undisturbed. But the cattlemen coveted the rich valleys where water could be secured without the expense of pumps and windmills, as well as the dry, bunch-grass uplands.

To hold the land they now occupied but did not own, they had allied themselves with the political party which promised a senator whose influence at Washington should favor them. If the agriculturalists won, the illegal fences stretched on every league of grazing land would have to come down, and that would be a serious if not fatal blow to the ranch industry as it was then conducted. Already there were threats and warnings from Washington.

All this Justin included in his wide survey of the conditions which confronted him. A poll of the votes to be cast had shown that he held in his hand the deciding ballot. If he says it to the cattlemen their candidate for United States senator would be elected, and would use his influence to keep the government from interfering with the illegal fences; the farmers would have to continue their unequal struggle, and perhaps would be forced ultimately out of the country; present ranch conditions would be maintained, and each winter would witness a recurrence, in a greater or less degree, of that terrible tragedy of the unsheltered range, where helpless animals perished by hundreds in the pitiless storms.